OPHELIA’S ROOM by Michael Scott Garvin – Literature & Thriller, LGBTQ+ Books, Suspense Thrillers

Ophelia’s Room by Michael Scott Garvin begins with a bang – and a child’s whimper.

A frantic, distraught father pounds on a bolted chapel door in a small country hospital…. A tiny, two-day-old infant cries in peril….  A deranged grandfather sees demons in every shadowy corner.

The opening scene read like something out of a young parent’s nightmare. Will their child be healthy? Will they grow up to be successful? Will the child be safe in their grandparents’ arms?  Questions that any new mother and father ask themselves. In Garvin’s Ophelia’s Room, the answers are terrifying.

An ominous heaviness looms over this atmospheric psychological thriller, pulling readers along until the novel’s storm-wracked climax.

Welcome to 1969, Parsons, Kansas – a conservative backwater middle-American town skeptically views the changes in the outside world – an ongoing Vietnam conflict, a battle for civil rights, and women’s liberation – as the deviant workings of the devil infecting America.

The Mulls’ family tragedy expands well beyond the child’s monstrous murder when the townsfolk come to blame the baby’s death on her young mother, Delia. Rumors spread that the devil is living among them – and the suffering mother invited the evil entity into their town.

Ophelia’s Room burns throughout with suspense and trepidation. Michael Scott Garvin’s psychological thriller depicts the foreboding sense that a similar fate could happen to anyone – in any town, on any day. This in-depth character study slowly peels back the brittle surfaces of the novel’s cast of Parsons locals.

From one perspective, Ophelia’s Room reads like a recital of small-town life with its sense of camaraderie and community and, occasionally, petty, gossiping meanness as people move through the mundane motions of everyday living. Only in Garvin’s Parsons, Kansas, dread creeps through every turn of the page like some suspenseful Hitchcock film.

Two characters dwell in the heart of the story: the infant’s mother, Delia – and her troubled father, Lloyd Hudson – a convicted murderer imprisoned down the highway at the Kansas State Penitentiary.

As the story begins, Delia emerges from a deep trough of grief to discover that her friends and neighbors align with fear and religiosity instead of compassion. She struggles with the knowledge that her life will never be the same.

All the while, her father remains imprisoned. A compliant, God-fearing man, Lloyd preaches the gospel to his fellow inmates. But underneath his calm exterior, demons haunt him. To survive, Lloyd must take murderous steps to exorcise them. The struggle between the man’s better angels and his haunting demons lays the battle lines of this horrific tale. Pity the poor souls caught in his path.

Beware – Read with care and keep the lights on. You’ll need them!

Ophelia’s Room by Michael Scott Garvin is in the running for the Short List in the CIBA 2021 Mystery & Mayhem Book Awards.